Tag: presentation

Robert Mylne

Robert Mylne

Robert Adam

There are two sons of Deacon Mylne’s in Rome at present, studying architecture. One of them had studied in France and has accordingly that abominable taste to perfection: the other, who came straight from Scotland, has made great progress and begins to draw extremely well, so that if he goes… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Peter Eisenman

The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More

On Drawing

On Drawing

Adolfo Natalini

When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More

Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney

Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney

Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Carlos Diniz

The following is excerpted from Two Continuous Monuments, by Nicholas Olsberg. Published in the AA Files No. 71, 2015. The architect’s guiding idea has been to create a building which would ‘literally tend to disappear – becoming one with the landscape’ … The dramatic architectural concept and primarily coniferous flora… Read More

Henri Labrouste

Henri Labrouste

Barry Bergdoll

The following has been excerpted from Labrouste (1801-1875), Architecte : La structure mise en lumière, 2012. In 1840 Labrouste plays an essential role in a political spectacle in which the stakes are high for the faltering regime of Louis Philippe: the return of Napoleon’s ashes that will be buried in the… Read More

A Lung for the City (1984)

A Lung for the City (1984)

Cedric Price

The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More

Ville Spatiale

Ville Spatiale

Yona Friedman

The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More

Believe in books (1998)

Believe in books (1998)

John Hejduk

I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. -John Hejduk Quoted from Such Places as Memory, 1998

Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents

Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents

1-170-604: Zelthaut für ein kugelkalottenförmiges Zeltgestell 1-097-653: Bauwerk in Kugel- oder Kugelabschnittform 1-292-354: Räumliches Gitterwerk für Gewölbe, Kuppeln 926-229: Geodesic Dome 1-294-387: Dôme à construction triangulée 1-009-850: Geodesic Structures

Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle

Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle

The watercolour of the Sainte-Chapelle drawn by Lassus dates from the first years of the restoration, when the desire to restore the monument to its original thirteenth-century form was still very strong. The chapel is shown without its fifteenth-century flamboyant rose window and its exterior staircase built by Louis XII,… Read More

Isolation or participation?

Isolation or participation?

Ugo La Pietra

Isolation or participation? The immersions were allusions to two contrary attitudes ever present in the deportment of so many in this era: a readiness to join the currents of social change or a determination to isolate oneself, waiting for what might be next. 

Preamble to a New World (1963)

Preamble to a New World (1963)

Constant

Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.

A life of their own (1985)

A life of their own (1985)

Paul Rudolph

The following has been excerpted from Staying Creative; Artistic Passion is a Lifelong Pursuit – and These Mature Masters Prove the Point. (Otto Luening, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Rudolph), December 1985. I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It… Read More

John Lautner: house and studio for Edgar Ewing

John Lautner: house and studio for Edgar Ewing

Nicholas Olsberg

On presenting himself as a potential apprentice at Taliesin to Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., Lautner heard no objection except the sly comment that he would be ‘too big for the rooms’. Everything about his approach to visualising a design speaks to the distance from which this towering figure saw the… Read More

History & Origins

History & Origins

Aldo Rossi

And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More

The hatred of rendering (1930)

The hatred of rendering (1930)

Le Corbusier

The following has been extracted from a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1930. I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is… Read More

Five Boxes

Five Boxes

Michael Craig-Martin

Line drawing — drawing without shading, cross-hatching or chiaroscuro — permits and conveys the most precise sense of accuracy of any kind of drawing. The facts are laid bare, nothing can be fudged or obscured. Leonardo used line drawing for his studies of everything from flying machines to the human… Read More

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

Editors

This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More

The changing metropolis 1815–1900

The changing metropolis 1815–1900

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More

Future Scenarios, Part III

Future Scenarios, Part III

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More

Architectural anxiety

Architectural anxiety

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More

Landscape situations

Landscape situations

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More